Only Sexy People Have Sex?

In my latest post I said that the message “every girl is beautiful” can be damaging and confusing when by “beautiful” we mean “physically attractive.” I concluded that many of us insist on this message because we think physical attractiveness is absolutely necessary. We fear that physical attractiveness defines our worth.

But I think that begs the question: why are we so afraid that it defines our worth? Why did we start believing that?

It certainly isn’t new for us human beings to over-glorify specific human qualities (beauty, wealth, intellect) so much so that they overpower everything else. There’s usually a reason behind that glorification — usually a misunderstanding about human nature. I think this particular over-glorification of physical attractiveness developed out of our modern misunderstanding of sex.

Prior to the sexual revolution, sex was associated with marriage (at least in theory–  obviously not always in practice). This meant that longterm commitment was supposed to be the primary prerequisite for sex. But in our post-sexual-revolution pop culture, it is considered perfectly fine to have sex without commitment.

Now I’m not one to glorify the “olden days”– those times had their own issues with sexuality (prudishness, lack of emphasis on the female sexual experience)– but this particular shift in our thinking was a very problematic one.

Having taken sex out of its original human context, we hyper-focus on one of its many aspects. We have replaced commitment with sheer physical desire as the primary prerequisite for sex, and thus overemphasized the importance of that desire. Instead of something that happens for a combination of reasons, (comfort, children, pleasure and attraction, emotional intimacy) sex is simplified to something attractive people do because they are attracted to each other. The obvious conclusion is that the people who have the most sex are the people who are the most attractive– the only people who have sex are the people who are sexy.

This is the cultural misunderstanding that leads young people to scoff at the idea of the elderly having sex. We seem to believe that the only people worthy or capable of sex are those between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five — and that even then, they must look impeccable. We have, collectively, decided that sex is only for sexy people.

And how does this mess us up? Most of us feel the longing for the physical union that sex provides. So when that union, on principle, is removed from the context of love, it becomes dependent primarily on abs and curves rather than vows and commitment. Consequently, the importance of such abs and curves is amplified and the standards regarding them become much stricter. After all, if sexual desirability is the only reason for sex, than there is no room for the imperfections that true lovers accept and forgive. So anyone longing for that physical union can’t help obsessing over physical attractiveness.

Moreover, because romantic love is so strong and influential, whatever we believe about it inevitably affects what we believe about other types of love. When the most intense form of physical love seems to hinge on whether or not a stranger thinks you’re sexy, sexiness is going to seem a lot more important than it is. Our cultural misunderstanding that only sexy people have sex can easily lead us to the fear that only sexy people are really loved.

Is that a stretch? I don’t think so. Why else would girls starve themselves unless they believed it was the only way to be loved? Why else would an actress completely reconfigure her already pretty face? Why else do we have this alarming rate of elective C-section-tummy-tuck combination if not because women are terrified that they won’t be loved if they aren’t really, really sexy? In a world where bodily desires mean more than promises and commitments of the heart, the people of that world will inevitably worship the body— they will be willing to do anything, and ruin anything, for it.